Pike's Market: Savor Seattle Tour Part 2

Pike's Market - Savor Seattle Tour cont.

Amazing selection of pastas. We bought a few and sampled some chocolate linguine. Hmmm? Very different.
Mom and me by a flower stall.

Flowers!

I wanted to buy them all!

Yum!

Look at the size of these shrimp!

We stopped for a break at the Crumpet Shop and had many, many cups of tea, a crumpet with butter and honey and plenty of people watching.

Mural at the Crumpet Shop.

Mom buying some fruits and vegetables from Frank's Market.

We bought some smoked fish here.

Mom and me resting and drinking some more Market Spice tea with our new Market Spice bags.

Mom and Dad.

After all that food what could be better than a nice piece of gum?

Preferably not ABC gum!

Mom and Dad.

Dad and me.

Chickens! Yay!

This shop had all kinds of eggs - duck, quail, goose and chickens.

These are a few of the delicious things we bought (and ate!).

This butter was so, so good. We bought 2 tubs (in 6 days) and ate every bit.

Black velvet plums. So sweet!

A little collage.

Challenge: Can you make a meal from the above ingredients?

Sea beans. These were awesome. Just don't microwave them. They have sea salt ('cause they're from the sea) and the salt sparks in the micro.

Rainer cherries. Really amazing eaten on the beach.

Kumquats. My new favorite food. You want to kill yourself while you're eating them, because they are sour, but then they are sweet and ahhhhh delish and you want to eat another one. And another one and another one.....

Mangoes.

Mom making dinner. Yum!

Morels in sage butter. So, so good. Like vegetarian bacon fat. Crispy, chewy and salty.

Dad and me enjoying our sage butter morels.

Market Spice 'um spices? Tea and nice little tea bags and yeah spices too.

Bread, cheese and tomatoes.

Ah, dinner view!

Cluinary Tour - My Haitian Dinner

When I saw the fun Culinary Tour on Foodalogue I knew that I had to try it out and play along. This week the tour stop was Haiti. So I invited my Mom and Dad over for a Haitian Dinner.
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First up was Pikliz - a Haitian spicy pickle.

I chopped up 1/2 a head of cabbage.

Then finely chopped up 2 carrots and 1 onion in the food processor.

Then I mixed everything together and added a habanero pepper. Almost every recipe called for a scotch bonnet pepper or two, but I could only find habaneros.

I packed the whole mix into a BIG jar, with 2 tsp salt, 10 pepper corns and then I added white vinegar to fill up the jar.


Next was Joumou (pumpkin) soup and Diri ak pwa (red beans and rice).

I used squash that my Grandma grew in her garden and gave me - plus tomatoes I grew in my garden and canned.

Diri ak pwa
1 Tbs butter

1 small onion - chopped

1/2 yellow pepper - chopped

roasted garlic paste

tomato sauce - 1/2 cup

red beans, cooked - 2 cups

1 tsp. thyme

2 tsp. oregano

1 bay leaf

rice - 1 cup

1 3/4 cups stock

salt to taste

Saute onion in butter, add chopped pepper and rice. Add tomato sauce and spices, then add stock and red beans. Finally add garlic paste and bring everything to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer covered for 15- 18 mins.

JouMou Soup
2 cups pumpkin or squash - cooked

1/2 head of cabbage - chopped

2 carrots - chopped

1 small onion chopped

2 small potatoes chopped

garlic paste

stock or water - 4 pints

tomato sauce - 1/2 cup

2 tsp. lime juice

1/2 cup spaghetti - broken into small pieces

salt to taste

Saute the onion, add all the vegetables, spaghetti, tomato sauce and stock. Bring to a boil. Add garlic past and lime juice. Cover and simmer for 15 mins or until potato is tender.

Diri ak pwa cooking.

Adding spaghetti to Joumou soup.

Finally, Labouyi Bannann (banana cream).

1 unripe plantain

2 small ripe banana

1 - 12oz evaporated milk

1 - 12oz can of coconut milk

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp cinnamon

pinch of nutmeg

pinch of salt

1/2 cup brown sugar

dollop of lime juice

Blend the plantain and banana together and then add the mixture to a saucepan. Add milks and vanilla and spices. Simmer over med. heat until thick.

I added some fresh ginger, but that wasn't in the recipe.

Plantain and banana.

Cooking Labouyi Bannann.

I found these sodas at the grocery store. I'm not sure if they drink them in Haiti, but they were good. The coconut one was the best. The champagne flavor tastes like a cream soda.

I made Mayi Moulin - white cornmeal mush to go with the soup.

1 cup water

1 tsp salt

1/2 cup white cornmeal

Boil water and salt. Add cornmeal and stir together. Form mush into balls and place one into each bowl. Then pour soup around mayi moulin.

Whole dinner laid out.

Diri ak pwa

Joumou soup and mayi moulin

With added pikliz

And now with some fresh spinach.

Labouyi Bannann with cream and cinnamon.

Well, it was definitely a very interesting dinner! Minnesota and Haiti are very, very far apart. A lot of the Haitian recipes that I found included ingredients that I had never heard of and would never, ever find in the local grocery stores. So, I did a little improvising. I do not guarantee that any of these recipes are authentic, but they tasted good!

I actually like the cornmeal mush ball with the soup. It was a good combination and I have never eaten a cornmeal mush ball!

The red beans and rice were hands down the overall favorite.

The big excitement of the night was when my Dad 'accidentally' ate the habenero pepper from the pikliz jar.

Let's just say he couldn't finish the meal.......

I'm still trying to figure out how you 'accidentally' eat a huge, bright orange pepper. ?